It took some doing, but I managed to design and code, a full 100 collectable power-ups. Most of the artwork is still placeholder but all bonuses, attributes, special attacks, etc work in practice.

They come in 6 flavours:

ATTACK - bonus event on striking an enemy. eg: critical damage, exploding attackDEFEND - bonus event on being hit. eg: shield stops damage, retribution attack against enemyTEMPORARY - boost to attributes for x seconds. eg: for 8 seconds speed x2, increased healing PERMANENT - attribute increments. eg: increment health, speed, healingPASSIVE - works passively. eg: cause damage on touch, enemies drop more lootITEM - Items are single use and player can use any item that they have collected when they wish. Can be good for getting out of trouble when your back is to the wall.

So here's some pics and videos of a few of more of them being tested. See last blog for previous ones.

Bonus offensive machine-gun and grenade spam attacks.

Super Orbital Laser (anyone guessing the source of the name wins a free internet)

The Zone of Brass Monkies - slows all enemy who enter it.

Napalm Strike (need to work on those particles, not entirely satisfied with those flames)

And a quick test of shields in various colours.

I also spent some time reading through the code (this is why it's important to leave comments people!) and found a few things I didn't previously know about explosions - such as you can tie animated meshes to them. This help save a bit of overhead on things as in Airship Dragoon I had spawned "concussion blast spheres" seperately. So I decided to make the basic impact attack a little more interesting.

With the swag collectables coded if not modeled, next up is to test my ideas on how to actually model the environment and levels. And it looks something a little bit like this: